This game is going to die from not living up to high set expectations. Either everyone will complain it's too old school and leeching off nostalgia or people will complain its too modern and id is trying to copy call of duty.

Seeing as id has cleaned house, we might see some fresh talent that understand gameplay a bit better. Doom 3 was all right and Rage didn't sell well (I've yet to play it). Maybe they'll get their shit together and put more focus on gameplay this time. Surely they've learned by now that having a powerful engine is nearly irrelevant now.

reality 2.0 said:
This game is going to die from not living up to high set expectations. Either everyone will complain it's too old school and leeching off nostalgia or people will complain its too modern and id is trying to copy call of duty.

Yep, Carmack has recently acknowledged this. This happens because people can't really decide what REALLY makes Doom. For some it's the dark and brooding atmosphere, for others it's the action but in truth it's both.

DooM_RO said:
Yep, Carmack has recently acknowledged this. This happens because people can't really decide what REALLY makes Doom. For some it's the dark and brooding atmosphere, for others it's the action but in truth it's both.

And Doom 3 was only graphically revolutionary, really. And even that was undercut by the production delays, which allowed other games with similar per-pixel shadow/unified lighting engines to come onto the scene. Around the time of Doom 3's release, many felt Chronicles of Riddick was "the better Doom 3."

Megamur said:
And Doom 3 was only graphically revolutionary, really. And even that was undercut by the production delays, which allowed other games with similar per-pixel shadow/unified lighting engines to come onto the scene. Around the time of Doom 3's release, many felt Chronicles of Riddick was "the better Doom 3."

Not just graphics but also immersion and art style which are probably the only traits of the game that were even close to perfection.

I think it was a mistake for me to call it revolutionary. While it was innovative, Doom 3's existence owes a lot to System Shock 2 and Half Life. Had it not been for those games, Doom 3 would have been a brown Quake clone. In terms of single player, Id have not been truly innovative since the original Doom but people didn't notice this because they were too busy drooling over Quake 1 and Quake 2. The Quakes came out before Half Life, during a time when people could still be impressed just by graphics. After Half Life this wasn't the case anymore which is why Doom 3 was more poorly received.

I find it funny how people raged that the BFG boss was a reskinned guardian but failed to notice that more than half of the Doom 2 resources were ripped from Doom 1. Very strange.

Maybe because Doom 2 didn't do palette swapped copies of boses such as the Cyberdemon and the Spider Mastermind. :P Only a lesser monster such as the Baron of Hell was copied with a palette swap which is the Hell Knight.

DooM_RO said:
In terms of single player, Id have not been truly innovative since the original Doom but people didn't notice this because they were too busy drooling over Quake 1 and Quake 2. The Quakes came out before Half Life, during a time when people could still be impressed just by graphics.

I think people were largely impressed by Quake's multiplayer. I don't think it invented FPS gaming over the Internet--I think Duke 3D actually might have done it earlier--but it really popularized it. So it wasn't just graphics that sold Quake. It was graphics and the chance to blow up your friends across the country. :)

id has recently once again entered a hiring spree mode, having currently 19 positions in addition to temporal play testers. The new positions mention working on a PC and next-gen project from the ground up.

Has DOOM 4 development been restarted once again, dropping the support for previous gen? Why look for testers then? Maybe the development is going so well and everyone feels so good about it that id is actually looking for people to work on another, fully next-gen game. How does that fit with a new Design Director and a new Art Director (late 2013)? Are they already on the next game? But then again, id has said they're focusing on only one game now.

Touchdown said:
Time for some completely pointless and far-fetched speculation.

Well it's all we have ;)

Touchdown said:
id has recently once again entered a hiring spree mode, having currently 19 positions in addition to temporal play testers. The new positions mention working on a PC and next-gen project from the ground up.[/b]

I never noticed that. Is it new?

Touchdown said:Has DOOM 4 development been restarted once again, dropping the support for previous gen? Why look for testers then? Maybe the development is going so well and everyone feels so good about it that id is actually looking for people to work on another, fully next-gen game. How does that fit with a new Design Director and a new Art Director (late 2013)? Are they already on the next game? But then again, id has said they're focusing on only one game now.

I would guess that they shifted focus to "nextgen" consoles some time ago. Carmack even hinted at some quakecon that it *could* happen. By now it wouldn't make much sense targeting ps3 and xbox360 unless it gets released tomorrow or something like that.

I don't know. I'm slowly losing interest in the project as it's starting to seem like vapourware. Give me a reason to care. I love secrecy surrounding projects which is (a small) part of the reason why I think JJ. Abrams is right for Star Wars 7, but I don't feel Id Software is in a position where they can allow themselves the luxury of being tightlipped about everything. In their position it's the sure-fire way to never win.UNLESS Doom4 is going splendidly and will be revealed sometime soon with a release following shortly. I severely doubt that.

It's only freaks like us that are anticipating Doom4 at this point. Nobody is holding their breath and all we hear directly from id these days is stuff about plush toys, people who made doom drawings and a floppy drive doom song. They could replace the entire company with a 15 year old temp and basically be just as visible to the public.

It's starting to feel like a grandpa teasing a gift you may or may not receive in 10 years. Nobody gives a flying fuck. Except us freaks :)

Last time I checked there were 6 positions + play testers, leftovers from the hiring spree from September. They must have added the new 13 positions recently.

Shaviro said:
I would guess that they shifted focus to "nextgen" consoles some time ago. Carmack even hinted at some quakecon that it *could* happen. By now it wouldn't make much sense targeting ps3 and xbox360 unless it gets released tomorrow or something like that.

That's what I thought too. Being a 2015+ title, I thought there's no point keeping the support for 360/PS3. But you never know. Maybe they'll want to hit the broadest market possible.

Shaviro said:UNLESS Doom4 is going splendidly and will be revealed sometime soon with a release following shortly. I severely doubt that.

Well, it definitively won't make it before 2015 at the earliest because there's already Wolfenstein coming out this year (and since we still have no release date, I'd guess late 2014). MAYBE DOOM 4 will be announced in 2015, with a release date set for 2016 or something like that.

I think you are pretty close in your estimation there. It's all speculation and so forth, but here's my take on it.
It's not completely unrealistic to expect that they started over on the project in the second half of 2013. They brought in that artist guy (Hugo?) who worked on Pacific Rim. He's not coming in mid project to draw a couple of concepts now is he? That would be a silly waste of a high-profile hire. It's only logical that they would bring him in as a chief artist on the project - and he's there to help them create the right style which they have apparently been struggling with.

This is just a hunch based on a couple of instances of communication, but I believe there has been some friction between Carmack and the rest of the lead. It wouldn't surprise me if his exit (which was most likely planned and anticipated at least ever since he started working for oculus) was a breath of fresh air for the development team. I imagine they had more free hands from then on. I am a huge fan of Carmack, but I really don't think he's the right guy to bring forward design of games OR engines at this point. It wouldn't surprise me if they started going in completely different directions from now on. For the better.

If I'm to put on the positive goggles, then this restart is also the last they do. The game will be out in 2017.

Yep, Hugo and a new Design Director that they have recently hired (don't know who he is but there was still a job posting a month or two ago). That's one of the reasons I've also speculated before that there was a restart last year. Hugo is actually id's (only?) Art Director so it's a big deal. So considering just a few months ago they were repeatedly stating that they have to get that "one game" right, I doubt suddenly they've got a second project in the works.

It's ironic how DOOM 4 was originally supposed to be the start of quicker development cycles for id but in the end it's on a straight path to becoming the longest development in id's history. RAGE took 7 years in total. DOOM 4 will hit 6 years in a few months. Also a fun fact, the gap between DOOM 3 and DOOM 4 will soon be bigger than the gap between DOOM II and DOOM 3. O_O

As for Carmack, according to this article, he left because Zenimax didn't want him to work with Oculus. For some reason they don't want id games (including new Wolfenstein) to support Rift. It makes sense now: BFG Edition was supposed to be the first Oculus game but one day they just cut it out. Probably when Zenimax stepped in to prevent id from working with Oculus.

I was actually convinced he wanted to leave ever since he started working for Oculus but right now I think he chose to do so when it became clear Zenimax would not allow him working with a third-party company. Guess Zenimax wants to keep everything tightly under its roof.

Shaviro said:
I think you are pretty close in your estimation there. It's all speculation and so forth, but here's my take on it.
It's not completely unrealistic to expect that they started over on the project in the second half of 2013. They brought in that artist guy (Hugo?) who worked on Pacific Rim. He's not coming in mid project to draw a couple of concepts now is he? That would be a silly waste of a high-profile hire. It's only logical that they would bring him in as a chief artist on the project - and he's there to help them create the right style which they have apparently been struggling with.

This is just a hunch based on a couple of instances of communication, but I believe there has been some friction between Carmack and the rest of the lead. It wouldn't surprise me if his exit (which was most likely planned and anticipated at least ever since he started working for oculus) was a breath of fresh air for the development team. I imagine they had more free hands from then on. I am a huge fan of Carmack, but I really don't think he's the right guy to bring forward design of games OR engines at this point. It wouldn't surprise me if they started going in completely different directions from now on. For the better.

If I'm to put on the positive goggles, then this restart is also the last they do. The game will be out in 2017.

I haven't seen Pacific Rim but I've heard it's a good movie. How do you see the Doom style made by this new artist?

I haven't seen the movie either.
It's difficult to say really. They could go a few ways.

First they could try to cartoon it up in order to an absolute copy of the old style. This would effectively cut off a large portion of its potential audience and leave the "realistic" graphics arms race which Doom was always a part of. It's not that a "cartoon" styled game can't be great and look amazing, it's just not what most people would expect form a Doom game and it is my estimation that it for this would be panned by the general audience.

Another way to go would be to disregard everything Doom and find a completely new style. I would expect this to alienate a lot of the core crowd for the game, leaving mostly newcomers and people who don't care about id software in general or Doom specifically.

The only viable route (and this is a broad spectrum of course) I see is to find a style that works with slightly exaggerated creatures (like seen in classic Doom), but is still grounded in the realm of graphical realism. It has to be colorful, but not cartoonish. As I've stated before, I think they weren't too far off with the leaked screenshots from 2 years ago.

I am pretty sure they're going with this (broad) 3rd option, so his task will as far as I can tell be to nail the design with those specs in mind. From what I saw of his speech at QuakeCon last year, he has a great eye for detail and practicality. How that exactly will bleed through in his work I don't know, but it struck me (to the best of my recollection) that he put a lot of thought into the design. Much more so than the standard "this looks cool" argumentation that id software has often used. I think he could be the right man for the job.

Hugo Martin said:
I can't speak specifically about what we're doing. I think it's basically about moving in a positive direction, and that's it. Working with the leaders; they have a plan in place, and I hope to facilitate that plan. Obviously, I'm contributing to it, Marty [Stratton, id Software executive producer] and I have a very close relationship. It's also, I guess, sharing my experiences with people. Both from an artistic and design standpoint but also a personal one. Just helping and pushing it in the direction they want to push in.

Hugo Martin said:
We like the same stuff. I like to do crazy sci-fi stuff, like creatures, monsters, tech, spaceships and stuff like that. Thatís what they [id] like to do, too.

Hugo Martin said:
I am INCREDIBLY excited about the project we are working on here at id. We have great things in store for the fans of id and gamers everywhere!

Hugo Martin said:
I draw a lot of comparisons to [Uncharted developer] Naughty Dog with what id is doing now, in terms of where they are as a company and the history of their company. In a good way. Thatís part of the reason why Iím here. Id is just a really good company. Ö Iíd like to think that at 36 Iím a better judge of these things than I was at 26, and so, yeah Ö Itís something that I feel really good about being a part of.

____________________________

Shaviro said:
First they could try to cartoon it up in order to an absolute copy of the old style. This would effectively cut off a large portion of its potential audience and leave the "realistic" graphics arms race which Doom was always a part of. It's not that a "cartoon" styled game can't be great and look amazing, it's just not what most people would expect form a Doom game and it is my estimation that it for this would be panned by the general audience.

I never understood that. DOOM was never intentionally 'cartoony'. No one ever called it cartoony until recently. It never crossed my mind ever, that id would go for a 'cartoony' style because that was never the style of DOOM. Within its technical limitations, DOOM was pretty realistic.

Oh don't get me wrong. I agree that Doom was realistic in its style back in 93, but if they tried to do a 1:1 you would end up with something cartoonish because the semi-abstract style (more a result of the time and limitations than direct choice) doesn't sit well in modern games.